The present invention relates generally to storage systems and, more particularly to methods and apparatus of server I/O migration management.
Recently, Information Technology (IT) platform has been utilizing new I/O switch devices such as Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) Express (PCI-e) switch. PCI-e switch increases I/O flexibility to server systems compared with the on-board or normal PCI I/O devices. By using the PCI technologies, a server system can communicate with other server, storage and network systems after they are configured correctly.
U.S. Patent Publication No. 2005/0125590 A1 discloses an inside implementation of PCI-e switch. And U.S. Patent Publication No. 2005/0270988 A1 discloses a method to configure PCI-e switch connections.
However, these patent publications and the standards for the PCI technologies do not specify the I/O management method for the PCI-e switch although the PCI-e switch has a potential to increase dynamical flexibility to server systems. If many I/O traffics concentrate to one particular I/O device, it is hard to control these traffic behaviors.